Concept thread · Rights
the right to bear arms
The asserted right of citizens to possess arms, twinned with the fear of standing armies and the trust in the militia, codified in the Second Amendment.
The thread
- 1689 · grievesupheldThe declaration lists the disarming of Protestant subjects, while papists were armed, among the abuses of King James that justified his removal.⚖ Here the Bill of Rights is keeping a list of grievances, not granting a right: it complains that King James had "good subjects being Protestants" disarmed "at the same time when papists were both armed and employed contrary to law." That is a charge that the disarming was unfair and one-sided, which is why this thread reads it as a complaint rather than a guarantee; the actual promise that subjects "may have arms for their defence" is made a few lines later and is tracked on its own separate thread to the right to bear arms.
- 1689 · codifies · codified into lawThe Bill fixes as fundamental law that Protestant subjects may keep arms for their defence, the English ancestor of the right to bear arms.
- 1791 · echoesnuancedThe Second Amendment's guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms restates this earlier English declaration that subjects may have arms for their defence.⚖ The Second Amendment grows out of the English declaration, but it does not simply repeat it. England let only "subjects which are Protestants" keep arms, only "suitable to their conditions," and only "as allowed by law" — leaving the right at Parliament's mercy. The American text strips away the religious limit, the class limit, and the deference to lawmakers, declaring instead a right of "the people" that "shall not be infringed" — so it inherits the idea while widening and hardening it, the way the Third Amendment likewise echoes the Petition of Right and then goes further.
- 1791 · codifies · codified into lawThe Second Amendment fixes the right to keep and bear arms into fundamental law — the grievance's remedy, knotted in 1791.
Related threads
Threads argued alongside this one, or that answer it.
A thread read top to bottom is the spine of a paper: trigger → grievance → rebuttal → remedy → interpretation. See it in time on the timeline, or browse all concepts.